My Mother, Sandra O’Rourke: Her Life and My Memories

My mother grew up in the small town of Newport, PA as one of seven children. Her father worked for the railroad and was away a lot. It was the Great Depression and then the Second World War, so they never had enough, but they made what they had work. There were six girls, and my mother was the 5th in line; her only brother was the youngest. They entertained themselves and had lots of friends, but they also had a lot to do in the house. One of the most important aspects of my mother’s personality was her profound and enduring love and admiration for her own mother. My mother loved God and Jesus the most, but her mother was a strong second. Her frugality, her toughness, her obsessions with food and cooking, and her work ethic all came from her mother’s example. I didn’t get to see her mother at her best; at family gatherings she was always preoccupied with food preparation, and then she had a rapid loss of her mental faculties and long period of dementia until her death in her 90s.

Mom was the valedictorian of her class in Newport and joined the rest of her sisters by becoming a nurse. The timing is a bit fuzzy, but we are pretty sure she did her nursing training before she went to college as a way to help pay her tuition. She went to Juniata College, where she graduated with a degree in sociology. She apparently worked in the student health infirmary. One of the stories sent to us, from a friend of hers who also went to Juniata, told of a male student who was ill and staying in the infirmary who told his friends he wasn’t sure he wanted to get better because the nurse there was so much fun to be around.

She got a job as a nurse at Harrisburg Hospital and soon met my father. They fell quickly in love. He loved her beautiful eyes and, also, her legs, which wouldn’t get through her many pregnancies unscathed. After they were married, they worked at the Selinsgrove School, which was a place for disabled children, and then my father signed up for the Air Force. He went for training in San Antonio and on to Okinawa, then a U.S. Territory. My mother, pregnant with Jennifer, followed him there and had Jennifer there and then me. While there, she did not do much work outside the home, but she took cooking classes and learned how to make many Asian style meals.

When they returned to the US, my father started his residency in Radiology at Geisinger Medical Center in Danville, becoming the first doctor to work there who had been born there. We lived in a small house near the hospital, and my brother, Chris, soon joined us in May of 1965. We shared a bedroom and had a big back yard and the run of the neighborhood (we were forbidden to go into the nearby woods, as there were allegedly some rattlesnakes in there). It was a fun life. My mother knew how to have fun, and that was something everyone liked about her. An early memory was her watching the soap opera, “Dark Shadows.” I asked her who the strange man in the cape was and she explained he was a vampire. Until that point I had no idea there could be monsters, and it made it hard for me to sleep throughout the rest of my childhood. She soon stopped watching TV during the day, and we were not allowed to watch anything other than the morning news most days until 8pm. We still did get to see lots of cartoons and Sesame Street, so I know all the cultural touchstones of the average American kid from that era (one of the most exciting days of our childhoods was the first Saturday after school started, when all the new cartoons and shows would be on in the morning).

We moved to a much bigger house after Kelly was born and my parents set about getting it fixed up. We were close to my father’s parents, but it was farther to my mom’s, so we didn’t see them as much; mostly holidays briefly and maybe in the summer. Still, we liked our cousins and it was nice to see them and catch up on their lives and play with someone different. Otherwise, we went to a kindergarten right up the street run by three single elderly people in a huge Victorian mansion. We all had lots of friends and my mother shuttled us all over (no car seats, often no seat belts). Our elementary school was also in walking distance, and we got to come home for lunch. I am fairly sure I was walking to and from school alone a lot of the time as a 6 year old. She was tough about missing school, but she was also realistic. I was very smart and school was so boring at times I had to take an afternoon off now and then. She would let me just enough. I think she liked it when we were around some times, but other times she wanted us out of the house. “Get some fresh air!” she would tell us as we went out and breathed the fumes from the Merck drug manufacturing plant right across the river from us and inhaled all the lead from the gasoline burned by the cars going up the streets. We were generally trusted to be good and were most of the time. She was far from a helicopter parent; as long as we were out of her sight, she was happy. I don’t remember her coming to most of my basketball games, as I could walk to them (the big games, when we played for the championship, would get her to turn up), but she did come to my wrestling matches as a 7 and 8 year old because she had to drive me.

We also joined the local country club, Frosty Valley, as my dad loved to play golf. Once it got warm, he played golf every Saturday and Sunday, rarely missing a day, so we were still my mom’s to watch most weekends. We would go up there all the time to swim, play tennis, and try to play golf when the course was not crowded. My mother loved to be tan; she used only baby oil, and I don’t remember us getting much in the way of sun screen. We typically got a sunburn the first time out on our way to getting very tan the rest of the summer. She took up tennis and was fairly good. She once got on a good run and upset the usual champ one year. She was very competitive, and it rubbed off on all of us. She always cared if we won, a word she pronounced like you would the name, “Juan.”

This was all while she managed the remodeling of our house in the mid 70s. I was fascinated at her easy way with all the workmen and their obvious affection for her. She now had 5 children, Candace being the last, born in December of 1969. Even with all that going on: 5 kids, some of them old enough for piano lessons (we all took them, me probably the least), sports, a several year remodeling project, she started doing some work in the community. She worked with the American Heart Association and the Geisinger Auxiliary, and, in the mid 70s, she took up running once we were old enough to be left alone. It wasn’t enough for her to run; she started to organize races and a running club.

“Relax” was not a word used often in our house. Maybe just by my father, who preferred to be left alone after a day of work, reading and then watching a little TV. I loved to read, but there were few places one could go where it was quiet and comfortable. There was always noise, especially from the women of the house who chattered incessantly. My mother was on the phone most of the time she wasn’t talking with us or entertaining visitors. She had a loud voice, especially on the phone, and laughed and laughed while she talked. We were supposed to be doing something, anything, all day. The words she hated most were, “Mom, I’m bored!” She taught us all several solitaire games, so we could always do that on rainy days, and we had cupboards full of board games and puzzles, and we came up with our own games (apparently the floor of lava was a fairly common one in our era), had a swing set in the yard, and a nice hemlock tree to climb, as well as a dog or two and several cats. In addition to the fun things that we could do, she usually took us with her to work on her garden on the grounds of the state hospital or enlisted our help in her backyard garden as well. We all had some chores to do around the house, and she nagged and nagged us about all of them. It was a bit of chaos, but usually fun as well, and our friends loved to come over. We were allowed a cookie before 4pm, our last snack before dinner.

Meals were a mixed bag, bringing our family dynamics to critical mass as often as they bonded us. I have always been a big eater, and I liked most of what my mother made. Liver, which she liked to make us try once a year, was not a favorite, but with few exceptions, I was eager to gorge myself with whatever she put in front of us. My father, my brother and I all ate quietly and diligently (Chris called it “the eating mode”) while my mother and sisters insisted on discussing their days, most of which we had already witnessed. All of the girls were picky eaters; it was a fight nearly every night to get them to eat. My brother was somewhere between them and me. It was so annoying to listen to these arguments over and over. My father would only occasionally chime in on my mother’s side; there were a few occasions when what she made was too bad for him and me to even choke down, and then we cobbled something else together or got fast food. This was always a prelude to dessert, which was the highlight. My mother could bake! She cultivated a sweet tooth in all of us, but I like to say my sweet tooth is just slightly smaller than the vastness of the universe, slightly less than infinity. Her fruit pies were off the charts. They remain a great pleasure to try at restaurants to compare to my mother’s virtuosity with less sugar and “healthy crusts.” Pumpkin, lemon sponge, apple, cherry, blueberry, peach, and the treasured black raspberry with berries we picked ourselves in our garden were frequently consumed in mass quantities, with an assortment of cakes and cookies and cheesecakes, with my all time favorite of cherry pie filling on a cream cheese base with graham cracker crust. At Christmas she would make 30+ different kinds of cookies and treats, and my friends would come for “cookie tours” even into their 30s. This only captures a small portion of it! The freezer full of ice cream, the candy in jars all over were a test of our will powers; our active lifestyles, especially mine, allowed us to consume nearly as much as we could every day, and it never seemed to run out.

This wealth of food stood in stark contrast to her frugality and conservation measures. The completion of the remodeling coincided with the Oil Crisis in the 70s. We were trained to never leave a light on once we left a room. The house was kept at 60-62 degrees during the day in winter and turned down to 50 at night by the last person to go to bed. If you forgot to do that, you would hear about it more than once the next day, and for weeks after (same with leaving a light on all night). When I discussed this with her as she got older, she insisted I was not remembering correctly, but my memory was much better than hers! We had two space heaters that burned kerosene; one for the front, where my dad went often after dinner as it was generally warmer, and one for our big family room in the back. On the back patio there was a kerosene tank, and we would drag those heaters out to fill them on the coldest days (in addition to breathing those fumes much of the day, we also assisted her in scraping the lead paint off the walls and baseboards with torches with no protection. !!!!). We all wore lots of layers and had runny noses all the time. Our blankets were super thick, heavy comforters from my mother’s parents, and we wore thick pajamas. My bedroom had no direct heat (this is not technically true, as it had electric baseboard heaters, but I refused to turn them on) and was the coldest room in the house. I remember one bitterly cold night when I woke to ice on the INSIDE of my windows when I pulled the curtains up. Our couches and chairs all had blankets and afghans on them and we fought over the warmest ones (there was one golden, thick blanket reserved for when we were ill called “the sick blanket.")

Summer was just as peculiar. She refused to allow air conditioners. We had a few fans we would position strategically on the floors in the halls upstairs, and often the only place cool enough to sleep was on the floor next to them. Once we got enough fans to put in the windows in each of our rooms, it was much better, and I liked the white noise of them. She also insisted on leaving the doors and windows open all day with the curtains open (we would argue this made the house hotter, but she wanted the air moving and wouldn’t listen to us. My mother was not particularly reliant on logic and preferred how she believed things to be to reality and facts. She eventually allowed my father to put an air conditioner in a window of the front room, where he spent most of his time, but he had to keep the door shut. You would also be yelled at for having the door open to that room longer than it took for an escape artist to get in and out.

She relentlessly searched for bargains. She would drive 10 miles past our local grocery stores if she thought she could save a dollar or two on a few items, and then she would buy almost anything on sale. Our pantry was full of “bonus buy” labeled crackers no one ever ate. We would go out and pick our own fruit and vegetables at other people’s farms. We would drive to Reading, PA to go to the outlets there before school started to get our wardrobes. We collected green stamps and some of her favorite days were when we would cash them in on something that seemed practical but never really worked out.

She was about your average level of vain. She cared about her hair, but she finally gave up on dying it and gave in to her premature graying in her late thirties. Her running didn’t do much for her legs, which we (mostly me) referred to as “tree trunks,” certainly something I wish I had never said now. They were shapeless, utilitarian legs that developed bad arthritis and angled inward at the knees. My father would buy her lots of nice clothes, but she felt they were too good to wear and wore the same few outfits (sometimes several days in a row) until they were threadbare. She almost never wore makeup or used any kind of skincare product, and she eschewed jewelry except for a watch. She was naturally pretty, with beautiful, twinkly eyes and a lively smile, and she didn’t feel a need to look any better most of the time.

She was competitive, as I mentioned earlier, and she tried to get good at tennis with mixed results, but her running never got her anywhere outside of the end of the pack. I used to say she only beat the ambulance that followed the field in case someone was injured or passed out (no exaggeration: she often finished dead last in races). That said, she would have done quite well in this modern, participatory type of running scene. Her 10 minute miles kept her way behind in an era where only a bunch of geeks and nerds with a proclivity for suffering and endurance would put up with the jeers and ridicule one who ran would get back then. Now, she would finish in the top 50% in most races. She never got into golf, but she tried to win at everything else and was not above cheating, or at least stretching the rules (she would be famous for this with her grandchildren). She also wanted us to win at everything we did: her first question when we returned from any game was “Who won?” She griped about how her friends bragged about their children. She wouldn’t brag so much as hint when with her friends. We had to try just about everything, but she at least let us decide not to keep going when whatever she wanted us to try didn’t suit us well. I was that way with music and baseball - there was way too much sitting and standing around in each of those. She loved us all unconditionally, but we knew she also liked us to kick ass and take names, whether at school, in the band, or on the playing field.

She rarely took a vacation. When we went somewhere as a family, she dominated the agenda. At the beach she went early, chose the spot and set up. We were expected to spend most of our time there (by the time we were teens we did use sunscreen) and make the most of it. We knew it pleased her for us to go in the water or try something new. There was usually one beach vacation a year and a ski vacation in the winter. She was not a good skier but did it for us. She wrecked a lot, both on downhill and cross country skis, and we loved to laugh at her and she loved all of it as well.

She loved to entertain. She hosted many parties at our house once it was remodeled, and all the big shots from the hospital were there at one time or another. We were not always good, but we were never bad. I recall shooting whoever went to use the bathroom with ping pong ball guns, briefly escaping from our confinement in the front room. Her parties were fun, and even as teenagers and in college, we would spend New Years or other occasions with her and her friends, playing charades (she was ok at guessing but hopeless at acting out - it was always a highlight of any game to get her out there) or other games and eating as much as we could. She loved it loud, and she wanted lots of action; just this side of chaos. She loved to laugh at everything, and everyone loved to make her laugh. She had the best sense of humor about herself and loved to tell about dumb things she did or said (we all do that as well). The goal was usually to get her laughing so hard no sound would come out. That happened a lot, especially during games when her answer would be so ridiculous we would have to stop and all laugh until our faces were wet with tears. She was a huge fan of pranks. Early on, we had to pay close attention to everything on April Fools Day (even then she got us often), and she was fantastic at hiding our Easter baskets. One of Jennifer’s friends, Elizabeth Magill Billingsley, and Mom were always pulling pranks on each other, with fake letters, phone calls with disguised voices, “presents” mailed back and forth, etc.

Over all this hovered her faith. It was the most important driving force in her life. She loved God, loved Jesus, was devoted to Mary, and she was filled with joy by this love and wanted to share it with everyone so they could experience it as well. She did not do much preaching per se, but she brought it up a lot and we prayed before every family meal and before we left on trips. We were raised Catholic in accordance with documents she signed when she married my father, and Mom rarely went to church when we were young. She was “Born Again” in the early 70s and started attending the local Presbyterian Church with my sisters, including Jennifer, who had been confirmed in the Catholic Church by that time. She quickly rose to prominence there and did whatever forms of leading she could. We got involved in some of the earlier charity efforts she got herself into, and we would usually go to the service on Christmas Eve with her, jamming into one pew (she paid close attention to the families who brought the most people.). She was peripherally involved in the services for the most part, did not sing in the choir or do readings, but behind the scenes she worked to get the church involved in the community and trying to network with other churches to maximize the charitable impact. I remember going with her to drop off food at lots of old folks’ homes. As I got older I got more dedicated to Catholicism and read more about the saints and church history. I often joked with her that I went to the “One True Church,” and it seemed over time to convince her to look into the Catholic faith, especially after her trip to Medjugorje in 1986. She met the witnesses to the miracles there and came back even more motivated. Finally, in 1999, I sponsored her through RCIA classes and her joining the Catholic Church at the St. Joseph Parish in Danville. She quickly, with the fervor of the recent convert, moved into the leadership there. Her focus always was on the poor and suffering. She got a “Peace and Social Justice Committee” started and got St. Joseph more involved in the town and the world (they were very generous in supporting some of the charities I worked with in Africa as well). She often went to daily Mass and was a reliable attendee at even the least interesting services, trying to find something motivating. Toward the end of her life she did not waver; she still did Eucharistic Adoration, went to weekly Mass and other meetings. I am sure one of her most dispiriting aspects of the pandemic was not being able to go to Mass.

She was driven by this faith to always do what she felt was the right thing. That it was hard or no one else seemed to want to do it would not stop her. I was able to talk her out of a few of the more impossible ideas she had, but usually she would go ahead anyway. She was not just about the ideas; she wanted to work out all the details and still do more of the work than everyone else. I felt she went too far much of the time, making herself a martyr of sorts with all her challenges, overfilling her schedule and setting herself up for massive disappointments. But somehow she kept going; she would have been an able entrepreneur in modern times (except for her complete ineptitude when it came to technology). She was a visionary of sorts, able to not only see what was wrong but to find incremental solutions, to build on each small victory and figure out how to make things even better. As the culture of nonprofits became more settled, she would take care of grants and other submissions for funds, and she was very big on transparency and shared leadership, getting the best people to serve with her on the various boards (she was always talking about the boards!), but it was clear to everyone they should do things her way (with a few little adjustments here and there - she was not super rigid). In the end she wanted things DONE. There would be lots of talking and speculation, but results were what mattered to her. Kids with new socks and underwear to start school, winter coats to those who needed them, uniforms for the working poor, light and heat kept on, meals for the lonely and hungry, a place for the homeless. To see the programs as they run now is very gratifying after seeing how hard she had to work to get every one of them going. I was around enough to see a lot of it and help her often. While occasionally she would ask me in advance for help, she would usually come to me just when I settled in to read or watch TV (especially after I’d just come back from a round of golf or a hard workout) to ask me to come along to help move donated furniture, or to edit one of her letters or documents (her writing style often left out key things she figured everyone already knew). My biggest accomplishment was telling her early on not to get involved in medical bills or medicine purchases. It saved her a huge amount of hassles. There were plenty enough hassles as it was, but she almost enjoyed them. She certainly talked about them a lot.

My mother was not perfect. She did what she felt was correct all the time, but she wasn’t always correct about it. She could be a nag and be pretty annoying. She never hesitated to interrupt something we were doing, whether it was reading or looking at things, because to her it seemed like we weren’t doing anything important. She would always volunteer us for things without asking first. Her worst: She decided on her own to set up a job interview for me at a local convenience store (Willie’s One Stop) the day after I graduated from college #1 in my class and got all kinds of awards. We had a huge, fun party going on back home with all my friends when she told me I had to be at the interview at 5AM the next morning!!! The party went on most of the night but I had to go to bed just before it got really fun. I could have done the interview any other day, but she didn’t tell me until it was too late to call and reschedule. When she got a “bee in her bonnet,” it was hard to get her to let it go. She did things like come out to the front room while we were watching TV and stand in the doorway, talking very loudly on the phone with someone (all. the. time.). She would sit down and tear the plastic from stacks of envelope “windows” while we watched movies or sports to recycle the paper parts. She got chicken grease and peanut butter all over the phones. She once wore my running shoes and insisted they were hers (she had big feet like me), and I had a devil of a time convincing her otherwise. While we made it funny in her later years, she always tried to promote things: foods, games, tasks. She would go to all kinds of trouble to bring out more foods even after we were full and had stopped eating to try to get us to eat more (she was, like many mothers who grew up in the Depression, obsessed with food).

One of her greatest joys in life was spending time with her grandchildren. Though at times it was a burden for her, she embraced caring for them during the day while their parents worked. She did that for all of the older grandkids except Thomas and William Wentworth, who were too far away. The grandchildren got used to going on calls with her to see needy folks or to drop off things for shut-ins and some of her older friends. She kept them busy with projects and liked to play games with them. It made a measurable difference in all of their lives to have spent so much time with her.

This joy for the grandchildren was even stronger at “The Cottage.” In the mid-90s, my parents came up with what I thought was a crazy idea of buying a second home somewhere for us to use for our vacations, and they settled on a small, older house on a fairly big property at Keuka Lake, one of the smaller Finger Lakes in western New York. After a few rough goes at getting it set up for larger gatherings and packing too many people in at once, it turned out to be a fantastic place to go and spend time together. It was a lot of work, and she and my father did and paid for most of it. Her work ethic set the standard for all of us, and it was pretty much expected that every time you went there you would take on some kind of improvement project. I have no inclination to home repairs so I mostly worked on the grounds and bought things like kayaks, but over the years, all the money and sweat improved it. She loved being there and having projects to do, but even better was spending time with her children and grandchildren, especially playing games and eating too much. Even the simple things like sitting on the adirondack chairs by the water and listening to the kids talk about their lives and what they wanted to do enthralled her. Her face would glow. Even this past summer, our last family week there with her, under the strain of Covid-19 and her obviously failing health, she tried to get us all to pledge to spend at least 30 minutes pulling weeds on the beach, and I took a photo of her on her hands and knees pulling weeds next to the house (it all got done).

As she got older, her health got more and more fragile, but she bounced back each time to make the most of each day. Bad knees caused her to stop running, but she still walked and hiked regularly. The first time she nearly died was after coming back from volunteering in Honduras. She had gone there before for a week with a Catholic Church group and loved it. This time she didn’t feel well soon after getting home, finally confessing a fever to my father. She had an infection of her already damaged mitral valve in her heart (she probably had Rheumatic heart disease as a child from Strep infections), and she had a port put in place and got antibiotics at home through that for six weeks. The next time (I am aware of) was a bout of pericarditis, inflammation in the sack around her heart. I was in Africa at the time and made it home just after she got out of the hospital. My gestalt was she had been misdiagnosed with regards to her arthritis; her doctor thought it was run-of-the-mill, but she had a harder to diagnose inflammatory condition that required her to be on oral steroids for years to prevent pericarditis and a myriad of other consequences. She hated her rosy cheeks and the skin changes from the prednisone, and she had wound problems in her lower legs chronically after that. Then she had a massive gastrointestinal bleed related to her blood thinner for her heart (she had atrial fibrillation from changes due to the faulty valve). Fortunately her new doctors thought about the big picture with her and got her to have surgery to repair her damaged mitral valve. The cocky doctor who did it tried to do it a less reliable, but less invasive, way and it didn’t work (a testament to her toughness: despite heart surgery, after she came off the morphine IV she never took anything stronger than Tylenol for her pain). Her right hip then went bad. She got worse and worse, and I couldn’t see her going on much longer with it. Fortunately, tests showed her heart was now working well enough she could get the hip replaced. That went well, with my now retired father (he worked until he was 76) helping her and doing her exercises and rehab for her. Her knees were still very bad, and her heart continued to function worse and worse. It was obvious, after several other hospital stays for heart failure and even minor infections, she had little reserve capacity and every day was a physiologic mountain for her to climb. But she kept at it. This year the decline got sharper: she was losing weight, not able to get around well at all, focused on her weight. We tried to get her to eat better, and she started speculating about getting her knees replaced. Her heart was holding her back. We had one last hope: another heart valve was bad, her aortic, and if they fixed that, it might help her do better, and then, maybe, she would be able to get her knees fixed. Alas, the Cardiologist who had been following her for years felt the valve was beyond repair and said doing anything about it would likely make things worse. She died about a month later, resigned in ways to her fate and still trying to do as much as she could every day (she was working on a new charity to teach people to drive and find them cheap cars until the day she went into the hospital).

I last saw her in September, and we thought it best not to come home for what turned out to be her last Thanksgiving, a holiday she loved and obsessed about this year (as she did every year). Her last days still had her baking and making some cookies. She left a pie crust for one of her famous pecan pies to make for me for Christmas and a pumpkin pie, and we found a chocolate pizza on the porch she had not told anyone about. That she still wanted to do all these nice things for me, in addition to everyone else, with the last moments of her earthly life, meant so much to me.

I often laugh when I think of her impact on my life. I honestly can’t think of a single time she gave me any good advice about school/life/the world (maybe get out of the house?). My life would totally suck if I’d listened to her. Her ideas of what a life should be like and mine rarely synced up. I am sure my siblings would disagree on that point. Her deeds spoke to me much more than her words. I learned a lot from her about people, how to deal with them (everyone likes to be in on jokes, for example). I value toughness so much: not caring about the temperature, for example, which was a big thing with her, and coping with the difficulties of any challenge I knew I could handle (I am not sure where my self esteem came from, but I always felt like I could do almost anything better than anyone else - the main exception being sports - if I put my mind to it), and she was so, so very tough, putting up with so much in her later years but still going out there every day and not complaining much (though she did to me). Putting your own needs and wants second to the task(s) at hand was emphasized. That example helped so much with getting through my schooling and medical training, and even now getting through the drudgery of modern medicine. I had several other people who helped me learn how to make almost anything fun, but she was a big influence there as well.

I hope you can appreciate in this summary of her life and how dynamic she was. Determined; courageous; stubborn; steadfast; devoted to her faith, her family, and her community; a great friend; and super, super fun and funny. That was my momma. I will never forget her. She deserves all the rewards a human can get in the next life, but we still all feel her in this one and always will.